Traditional consumer centric (as opposed to enterprise centric) telecommunications services have typically involved broad categories of services. For example, these services include voice services that are primarily delivered using handsets, both wired handsets and wireless handsets, as well as data services, which provide access to features such as SMS (Short Messaging Services) and access to the Internet. Increasingly, data services are also delivering digital media content such as music and video to handsets.
In both voice and data services, in most telecommunications networks, there is a proliferation of Service Delivery Platforms that has resulted in silo'ed network architecture with the following broad characteristics:                Subscriber data is scattered in a variety of different repositories in the telecommunications network;        Provisioning activities have to incorporate the “logic” necessary to provision subscriber information in all the multiple repositories;        Service Applications that provide the services have to look at these multiple repositories during their call flow invocation sequence; and        The controls/policy associated with the services is managed by the services themselves, in adherence with the silo based architecture.        
To address some of the above issues, the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) architecture uses a central repository called the Home Subscriber Server (HSS). This central repository uses the Diameter protocol to provide access to this data, and to allow IMS defined nodes to subscribe to changes in subscriber information. However, the HSS based subscriber profile does not support any aspects of the subscriber profile that pertain to visual characteristics, such as the characteristics of a WAP page (Wireless Access Protocol) or a traditional portal rendered browser, such as a JSR 168 compliant portlet.
While it is true that no large scale implementations of IMS networks currently exist, what is also true is that these network implementations have not in any significant way addressed the domain of visually rendered revenue generating network services. Also, in both cases, there is a significant gap with respect to integrating accounting models for the purposes of supporting flexible downstream rating and subsequent billing models, specifically into an existing IP Multimedia Subsystem based infrastructure both for those that are prepaid as well as those that are postpaid.